The present invention relates generally to the field of cybernetics, and more particularly to artificial intelligence.
In artificial intelligence, an intelligent agent (IA) is an autonomous entity which observes through sensors and acts upon an environment using actuators (i.e., it is an agent) and directs its activity towards achieving goals (i.e., it is “rational,” as defined in economics). Intelligent agents may also learn or use knowledge to achieve their goals. They may be very simple or very complex: a reflex machine, such as a thermostat, is an intelligent agent.
Simple reflex agents act only on the basis of the current percept, ignoring the rest of the percept history. The agent function is based on the condition-action rule: if condition then action. This agent function only succeeds when the environment is fully observable. Some reflex agents can also contain information on their current state which allows them to disregard conditions whose actuators are already triggered. Infinite loops are often unavoidable for simple reflex agents operating in partially observable environments.
A model-based agent can handle partially observable environments. Its current state is stored inside the agent maintaining some kind of structure which describes the part of the world which cannot be seen. This knowledge about “how the world works” is called a model of the world, hence the name “model-based agent.” A model-based reflex agent should maintain some sort of internal model that depends on the percept history and thereby reflects at least some of the unobserved aspects of the current state. Percept history and impact of action on the environment can be determined by using internal model. It then chooses an action in the same way as reflex agent.
Goal-based agents further expand on the capabilities of the model-based agents by using “goal” information. Goal information describes situations that are desirable. This allows the agent a way to choose among multiple possibilities, selecting the one which reaches a goal state. Search and planning are the subfields of artificial intelligence devoted to finding action sequences that achieve the agent's goals. Goal-based agents are more flexible because the knowledge that supports its decisions is represented explicitly and can be modified.
Goal-based agents only distinguish between goal states and non-goal states. It is possible to define a measure of how desirable a particular state is. This measure can be obtained through the use of a utility function which maps a state to a measure of the utility of the state. A more general performance measure should allow a comparison of different world states according to exactly how happy they would make the agent. The term utility can be used to describe how “happy” the agent is. A rational utility-based agent chooses the action that maximizes the expected utility of the action outcomes—that is, what the agent expects to derive, on average, given the probabilities and utilities of each outcome. A utility-based agent has to model and keep track of its environment, tasks that have involved a great deal of research on perception, representation, reasoning, and learning.
Learning has the advantage that it allows the agents to initially operate in unknown environments and to become more competent than its initial knowledge alone might allow. The most important distinction is between the “learning element,” which is responsible for making improvements, and the “performance element,” which is responsible for selecting external actions. The learning element uses feedback from the “critic” on how the agent is doing and determines how the performance element should be modified to do better in the future. The performance element is what we have previously considered to be the entire agent: it takes in percepts and decides on actions. The last component of the learning agent is the “problem generator.” It is responsible for suggesting actions that will lead to new and informative experiences.